Hilary Mantel wins 2nd Booker Prize for Tudor saga

October 17, 2012

LONDON - British writer Hilary Mantel won the prestigious Booker literary prize for a second time Tuesday with her blood-soaked Tudor saga "Bring Up the Bodies," which the head of the judging panel said had "rewritten the book" on historical fiction.

Mantel, who took the 50,000 pound ($82,000) award in 2009 for "Wolf Hall," is the first British author, and the first woman, to achieve a Booker double.

"You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize, and two come along at once," Mantel said as she accepted the award at London's medieval Guildhall. "I regard this as an act of faith and a vote of confidence."

Mantel, who quipped in 2009 that she planned to spend her prize money on sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, said "I'm afraid the answer will be much duller this year."

"Rehab," she joked, before adding: "My pension, probably."

"Bring Up the Bodies" is the first sequel to win the prize. It and "Wolf Hall" are parts of a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, the powerful and ambiguous chief minister to King Henry VIII.

Alternately thoughtful and thuggish, trying to keep his head in a treacherous world, Mantel's Cromwell has drawn comparisons to the Mafia don at the center of the "Godfather" saga, and Mantel's novel combines finely wrought prose with thriller touches.

"You can see as much Don Corleone in this book as D.H. Lawrence," said Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard, who chaired the Booker judging panel.

"This is a bloody story," he said. "But Hilary Mantel is a writer who thinks through the blood. She uses her art, her power of prose, to create moral ambiguity."